The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • In English, the simple present often implies a general truth, regardless of time. While the present continuous strongly implies that the statement is true for the present, and weakly implies that it was false in the past.

    From your profile you apparently speak Danish, right? Note that, in Danish, this distinction is mostly handled through adverbs, so I’m not surprised that you can’t tell the difference. Easier shown with an example:

    Danish English
    Jeg læser ofte. I read often. (generally true statement)
    Jeg læser lige nu. I’m reading right now. (true in the present)

    Note how English is suddenly using a different verb form for the second one.


  • On itself, a simple claim (like “copyright destroys culture”) cannot be fallacious. It can be only true or false. For a fallacy, you need a reasoning flaw.

    Also note that, even if you find a fallacy behind a conclusion, that is not enough grounds to claim that the conclusion is false. A non-fallacious argument with true premises yields a true conclusion, but a fallacious one may yield true or false conclusions.

    The issue that you’re noticing with the title is not one of logic, but one of implicature due to the aspect of the verb. “X destroys Y” implies that, every time that X happens, Y gets destroyed; while “X [is] destroying Y” implies that this is only happening now.


  • For my main thoughts on this matter, refer to this comment. I’ll only mention what’s different from this source to the other:

    “We are more transparent than many players in this industry who have used public content to train their models and products,” Meta said.

    “Since some people kill puppies, just kicking one is totally fine” moral reasoning might perhaps give you some breach in countries following Saxon tribal law, but not in countries following Roman civil law. In those, what matters is the law, not how the relevant organs handled other similar cases.

    The law in this case being the LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados - Data Protection General Law). If it’s found that Meta’s activities violate the LGPD, well, cry me a river, “I dun unrurrstand, Google does it worse, I’m so confusion…” won’t save Meta’s skin.


  • This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

    1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
    2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
    3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
    4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

    Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

    “Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

    The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.


    If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

    Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

    What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

    …I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.




  • I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.

    Here’s how I see it working.

    Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.

    The multi owner can:

    1. edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
    2. make the multi public or private
    3. use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
    4. use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms

    By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)

    You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.


  • Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

    That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

    For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

    It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).


  • Ah, got it.

    The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)

    Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.



  • By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?

    If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.

    If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.


  • I’ve seen worse stuff. I’ve caused worse stuff.

    In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.

    And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It’s completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.

    Then there’s that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things “like a chemist”. So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.

    He called it “bananacello”. Everyone else, including me, called it “banana de plástico” (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because “a good chemist likes alcohol” was our motto back then.


    • [Iulius] Num lupam similat?
    • [Brito] Quid?
    • [Iulius] LVPAMNE ILLE TIBI SIMILAT???
    • [Brito] Nullo modo!
    • [Iulius] Quare sicut lupam illum igitur futuere uis, Brito?
    • [Brito] Nolo!
    • [Iulius] Per hercle Brito, futuisti! Sic! Tu Marcellum futuere conatus es!
    • [Brito] Non, non…
    • [Iulius] Sed Marcellus Alienis fututum esse non amat. Nisi a Domina Alienis.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.worldNeo-Nazis Are All-In on AI
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    15 days ago

    Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

    I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

    Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.


  • I hope so. This means that my mum will live to her 100s then. She’s crazy for this stuff. Story time:

    >going to the market with my mum
    >mum puts a few trays of Brand A garlic bread into the cart
    >we walk a bit and grab a few other items
    >couple sales representatives of Brand B see the cart
    >roughly my age, 30~40yo, also men
    >they get mildly curious, ask me about it
    >trying to genuinely understand customer preferences
    >they also noticed that I didn’t buy barbecue stuff
    >I point to mum and say “the garlic bread is hers”
    >mum spends 15min talking with one of representatives
    >about her breakfast garlic bread
    >why she prefers that brand
    >how they could improve their own brand
    >the other representative annotates stuff nonstop
    >months later Brand B releases a line of garlic bread with hot pepper

    Moral of story: if you see a cart full of extra spicy garlic bread being pushed by an almost-40yo with a beer belly, don’t assume that it’s for barbecue. Sometimes it’s for the breakfast of some granny alongside him.


  • By far, my biggest issue with flags in r/place and Canvas does not apply to a (like you said) 20x30. It’s stuff like this:

    \

    People covering and fiercely defending huge chunks of the canvas, for something that is completely unoriginal, repetitive, and boring. And yet it still gets a pass - unlike, say, The Void; everyone fights The Void.

    Another additional issue that I have has to do with identity: the reason why we [people in general] “default” to a national flag, for identity, is because our media and governments bomb us with a nationalistic discourse, seeking to forge an identity that “happens” to coincide with that they want.

    But, once we go past that, there are far more meaningful things out there to identify ourselves with - such as our cultures and communities, and most of the time they don’t coincide with the countries and their flags.

    As such I don’t think that this is a discourse that we should promote, through the usage of the symbols associated with that discourse.

    Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people

    I think that this is more of a matter of worldview than where we’re from, given that some people in Brazil spam flags in a way that strongly resembles how they do it in USA.